How to Be Alone (School of Life) (13 page)

John Pettie’s ‘The Vigil’: A squire prepares himself for life as a knight on the eve of his knighting ceremony.

4. Creativity

‘Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school for genius,’ wrote Edward Gibbon.

Of all the claimed rewards of being alone, this is perhaps the easiest to ‘get’. It seems rather obvious that great art, great original thinking, any creative work, needs to be done in some degree of solitude. What is more, all the creators tell us so – from Franz Kafka to William Wordsworth; from Werner Heisenberg to Beatrix Potter; from Georgia O’Keefe to Ludwig Wittgenstein (just to take a tiny range). It seems a universal truth, and it mirrors our own smaller experimental performances. But actually it is slightly odd, because, as Anthony Storr puts it, ‘Art is communication … explicitly or implicitly the work which [is produced] in solitude is aimed at somebody.’

We seldom inspect this paradox, because the reality is so self-evident. Kafka wrote to his fiancée:

You say you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess, that utmost of self-revelation and surrender … that is why one can never be alone enough when one writes … why even night is not night enough.

(You may not be very surprised to learn that, shortly after this, they broke off the engagement!)

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke advised a younger poet,

What is needed is … a vast inner loneliness. To walk in one’s self and to meet no one for hours on end. That is what one must be able to attain … looking out from the depths of one’s own world from the expanse of one’s own aloneness which is itself work and rank and profession.

In
A Room of One’s Own,
Virginia Woolf argues very convincingly that the reason there were so few great women writers is that it was so difficult for them to be alone: a writer needed a room of her own and enough money to occupy it. Women were not lacking in talent, intelligence, energy or imagination – they were lacking in solitude, in the chance to be alone for long enough to be creative. Later Woolf goes on to try and work out why solitude mattered so much to creativity. She suggests that every woman is haunted by a sort of inner ghost, which she calls ‘the angel in the house’ (after a Victorian poem of that name by Coventry Patmore extolling his wife as the ideal woman). Woolf describes the perfect woman as

intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed daily. If there was a chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it … Above all, she was pure.

This angel-ghost prevented a woman from doing anything so assertive and ‘aggressive’ as truly creative work. But Woolf goes on to suggest that this ‘angel’ was a social construct (in the interests of husbands, fathers and men more generally) and an imaginative projection. In order to ‘kill the angel’, which Woolf considered both necessary and difficult, you had to get away from all the people who were projecting, were constructing the would-be writer, not as writer but as an ‘intensely sympathetic’, ‘pure’ and ‘unselfish’ woman. To get away from them all you had to be alone.

Emily Dickinson: Great original thinking, any creative work, needs to be done in some degree of solitude.

At first sight this might seem to apply only to women – and certainly the ‘angel in the house’ is a peculiarly female problem – but I think that perhaps everyone, even the notably introverted Kafka, is haunted by an inner ghost who undermines creativity by implying that there are better things to do with your time, asking sarcastically who you think you are and preaching modesty and humility and ‘unselfishness’, or the social duty to get rich, help other people and be a good team player or other social obligations. If these are really social constructs which we have internalized, they tie very neatly into our society’s negative views about solitude: the two reinforce each other.

It is difficult to create any solid theory about the human imagination, how it is triggered into action of any kind, and what might be done to develop and strengthen it. But anecdotally, and in almost all biographies of creative artists and scientists, periods alone seem to be crucial.

Werner Heisenberg wrestled for some years with the theoretical question of how to model the atom to take into account the mathematical problems which seemed to distort all the data. He talked at length with his friends and other experts; they seemed to get nowhere and he was intensely frustrated. And then in 1925 he had the ‘good luck’ to suffer a violent attack of hay fever; to recover from this he went off on his own to Heligoland (an island in the North Sea, famous for its absence of pollen). And there he was alone. And alone he came up, very quickly, with his Theory of Imprecision (now normally called the Uncertainty Principle). It was a profoundly creative piece of physics, and it challenged and inspired many of the people whom he had been talking to beforehand. It opened the door for one of the most creative few years that modern physics has ever known: quantum mechanics sprang into existence because of Heisenberg’s hay fever and the solitude it imposed on him.

If you feel any identification with Heisenberg’s frustrations, in any creative area, you do not need to have a major allergic reaction; you can just go off on your own and see if it helps. Solitude is a well-established ‘school for genius’, and the outpouring of creativity is one of its promised joys. In learning to be solitary and happy with it, you can prepare yourself for this sort of creativity.

5. Freedom

We value ‘freedom’ very highly in our society. Perhaps for the first time in history we speak of it as an absolute and unalienable right for every human being. Sometimes I think we see it as so obviously a good and necessary quality of life that we do not examine what we mean by it.

But it is not really that simple. In the first place freedom has two dimensions: there is ‘freedom from’ – from things you dislike, that bind or limit you (poverty, pain or fear, for example). And there is ‘freedom to’, which is, I think, the more important, the more joyful and the more enriching. It seems that the American Declaration of Independence was trying to draw this distinction between the two when it separated ‘liberty’ and ‘the pursuit of happiness’.

And it is this second dimension of freedom which has been associated with solitude – first to work out what you desire to be free to do, and then to imagine and create the doing of it. In
The Stations of Solitude,
the philosopher Alice Koller defined freedom as ‘Not only having no restraints, but also being self-governing according to laws of your own choosing … where your choices spring from a genuine sense of what your life is and can become.’ In this short passage she moves from ‘no restraints’ (freedom from) to being ‘self-governing’ (freedom to). In order to achieve this second sort of freedom she suggests that you need a ‘genuine sense of what your life is and can become’. That is to say, you need a consciousness of yourself, and we have already seen how solitude enhances and develops that self-awareness which is the first step towards being self-governing.

But it goes further than this. There is a very real sense in which the presence of other people limits our personal freedom. At the very crudest level most of us do not feel ‘free’ to pick our noses or fart in company. A little further up the social scale, even in these libertarian times, many places of business still require workers to wear a uniform and most have an implicit, if not an explicit, ‘dress code’. Even party invitations suggest what you might want to wear – and most people find this helpful, even though it is of course a restriction. Even if you decide not to abide by the advice, your complete freedom to dress as you choose will have been compromised. On the whole, people in a group feel most comfortable when they are, broadly speaking, conforming to the behaviour of that group. When my ex-husband and I separated, our houses very quickly diverged in decor – while we lived together I did not feel consciously inhibited, but the first room I decorated in my own single-person household was a colour I would not even have thought of before. We did not fight about the colour of the walls, but I learned (and judging by his present house, he also learned) to pre-compromise when we came to make those kinds of choices. Now I know I like jewel-bright colours to live with. Being with each other, in this small and not very important way, restricted our personal freedoms. It is inevitable, and in any good relationship an acceptable price to pay, but we should not disguise from ourselves that there is a price.

Because there is another more profound sense in which being alone strengthens personal freedom. Assuming that you are a reasonably nice person, who finds it easier to feel happy and confident when those around you – and especially those you love – are happy, then some of your energy and imagination is bound to be (and should be) engaged in their happiness as well as your own. R. D. Laing, the radical psychiatrist, wrote a little monologue to show the way in which love itself – desiring the good of the beloved other – can make personal choice and freedom extremely complex. Here the ‘speaker’ (a fictional voice) wants to be happy but sees that those around her are not:

They are not having fun.

I can’t have fun if they don’t.

If I can’t get them to have fun, then I can’t have fun with them.

Getting them to have fun is not fun. It is hard work.

I might get fun out of finding out why they’re not having fun.

I am not supposed to get fun out of working out why they’re not.

In fact this sense of knowing yourself alone and nakedly, so to speak, may be one part of why solitude inspires creativity – because creating something yourself, of your own, uniquely, requires a kind of personal freedom, a lack of inhibition, a capacity not to glance over your shoulder at the opinions of others.

Nonetheless, it is oddly the case that life with others seems to work more smoothly when individuals do know what they want, even if they are prepared to compromise it for the greater collective enjoyment. Nothing is more destructive of warm relations than the person who endlessly ‘doesn’t mind’. They do not seem to be a full individual if they have nothing of their own to ‘bring to the table’, so to speak. This suggests that even those who know that they are best and most fully themselves in relationships (of whatever kind) need a capacity to be alone, and probably at least some occasions to use that ability. If you know who you are and know that you are relating to others because you want to, rather than because you are trapped (unfree), in desperate need and greed, because you fear you will not exist without someone to affirm that fact, then you are free. Some solitude can in fact create better relationships, because they will be freer ones.

Here is Alice Koller again, summing up these points:

Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your own presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement.

V. Conclusion

I chose to write this book back to front. It is more usual with this sort of ‘handbook’ to begin with all the glories and delights of your subject and only move on to the problems and more negative details once you have whipped your readers up into a state of joyful anticipation. I’ve done it the other way round. This is because, although I myself love being alone and want other people to enjoy it more, I am very aware that this is a bit countercultural in our present society. So I decided to get all the negative stuff out of the way first and keep the benefits and delights of solitude until those that needed it were reassured and so that readers could finish the book on a joyful high.

There are many joys of solitude but in this book I have outlined those that seem to me the most obvious and open to everyone’s experience. If even one of these five rewards or benefits of being alone has content for you – and it generally appears that in fact they come together to a considerable extent – then it is worth overcoming any fears or doubts you may have about embracing the freedom and at the very least trying out some personal solitude and seeing what happens. It is an adventure.

Homework

The following pages include ideas and books to help you think further about solitude.

I. Introduction

There are two important theoretical books about being alone: rather annoyingly they are both called
Solitude.
One is by Anthony Storr (Flamingo, 1988) and looks psychoanalytically at solitude, loneliness and creativity, and concludes there are other routes to fulfilment and psychic well-being than intimate relationships; creative work may satisfactorily replace these. (The book was originally titled ‘School for Genius’.) The other is by Philip Koch and is subtitled ‘a Philosophical Encounter’ (Open Court Publishing Co., 1994). Both are deeply affirmative and helpful.